‘He wrote a wonderful book by all accounts.’
‘He wrote an unreadable book. I know – I tried it. All of the would be’s if they could be’s were reading it in the Canal Zone. Anyone who tells you it was a good book is just trying to show you how terribly intellectual they are. Lawrence couldn’t spell, and his editor didn’t even bloody try.’ Warboys seemed amused by the way the conversation was going; I thought I ought to finish by keeping him on side. ‘Don’t worry about it. You probably wouldn’t like the books I read either.’
‘What do you read?’
‘The Americans mainly. The language is dead and buried in Britain or the colonies – the Americans are the only ones keeping it alive. Hemingway and Steinbeck, Spillane and Chandler – people like that.’
‘Weren’t they a colony once?’
‘Yeah, but they got out because they didn’t like the books we were writing.’
Warboys laughed again. I was sure that he had gone to school at one of the places where they have fags, instead of smoking them.
‘Who would be a good American writer to start on, in your opinion?’
‘Zane Grey or Holly Martins.’
‘Never heard of them – interesting names though. Ready for a coffee stop? I know a tidy little Turkish café in North Nicosia.’
‘That’s a very good idea, Tony. Perhaps a decent coffee will stop me sounding so much like a berk.’ It was a word we used in the fifties; it meant fool.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Keep going. I like being challenged.’
The coffee was as good as he promised, and he was able to park the wagon where he could keep his eye on it. The café – Café Truva – was on a big, sun-splashed cobbled square, looked down on by old three-storeyed buildings. Washing strung across the streets like flags. Five roads led into the square, or more importantly out of it. I suspected that this fact figured in Warboys’s choices. We stood up at a high aluminium bar, swallowed a coffee each, and pushed our cups back for a refill. It was like drinking an electric shock.
‘I don’t quite know why I was beginning to sound so angry, Tony. I think it was something to do with your speaking voice.’
‘How do I sound?’
‘Like an upper-class berk: I’m a lower-class berk. Where did you go to school?’
‘Guess.’
‘Somewhere very expensive.’
‘Wrong. Round the corner. This is my home patch, old son. The English School in Nicosia . . . T-E-S, as it’s known over here. My old man was in the Foreign Office, and was out here ten years or more.’
‘I don’t suppose he knew someone called Carlton Browne?’
‘Old CB? Course we did. Everyone knows him.’
Ah. I knew there was something. There’s always a little bloody something.
‘So you knew I was coming out here?’
He didn’t reply. He just smiled his best smile, and hoped to get away with it.
He said, ‘You needed tobacco, you said? Why don’t you pop through there, and see if my friend Alev here can help you?’ Alev was a tall, bony Turk with an outrageously naked upper lip: he probably wanted to stand out from the crowd.
There was a bead curtain shielding an arched doorway. I elbowed my way through it and found myself in a large room like a warehouse, full of life’s little necessities. I hadn’t seen anything like it before, not even a country Co-op . . . and I couldn’t believe in the three two-ounce tins of Sweet Chestnut Flake I shortly found in my hands – it was difficult enough to get it in Blighty! McVitie’s Digestives, Callard & Bowser Creamline Toffees, Liquorice Allsorts and Wine Gums . . . and those new-fangled drip-dry shirts you never had to iron. An Aladdin’s fucking cave. There was even a pile of dog-eared English paperbacked novels.
I walked back to Warboys having done a deal for the tobacco, two shirts and a case of Watney’s beer.
‘Where the hell does he get this stuff?’ I asked him. ‘There’s a king’s fortune in there.’
‘I steer him in the right direction. Your pal Pat mostly – he won’t mind me telling you.’
‘What about the police?’
‘The civvies raid us now and again, but we always get a warning, and send them away with a few cartons of fags to keep them happy. Old Collins leaves us alone – he knows I work out of here.’
‘And Alev here,’ I indicated the tall, calm man who seemed to run the place and who had followed me out, ‘is peculiarly discreet, I suppose?’
That bloody smile for all the world again. Warboys said, ‘It’s this way, Charlie. My mother died when we were still here. I was about four. My father sought consolation in the arms of others – a surprising number, if the truth be told – so Alev is actually my kid brother.’ I should have spotted the resemblance: it was there if you looked for it. The two brothers then gave each other the hug they’d been holding back. ‘Alev is a comrade,’ Warboys continued. ‘He wants a free Turkish republican state in Northern Cyprus after the British leave.’
‘And I suppose you’ve promised it to them?’
‘Yes, and with all my heart. They will be free of these bloody Greeks, or I’ll die trying.’
There was just that moment. That gleam of the fanatic in his eyes. Bloody Lawrence again; why couldn’t he have stayed at home, and written learned monographs about Templar castles? Fuck it!
Alev gave me a hug as well before we drove away. In the cab of the truck I recalled something that Warboys had said.
‘Tony?’
‘Yes?’
‘When you were telling me who Alev was, you used the word comrade.’
‘That’s right, old son. Alev is a comrade . . . just like you and me.’ Bollocks. A Turkish freedom fighter, a throwback to the days of empire, and reluctant
